What's up with 'Microsoft' as the default company and copyright on project settings in Visual Studio?

Question

I noticed that when I enter the Assembly Information dialog, for a project created in

• Visual Studio 2010
• Visual C#/Basic 2010 Express

...the company and copyright fields default to Microsoft (...). How odd is that? If a developer were to forget this, Microsoft practically brands software made by others as their own.

Is there some way I can change the defaults for this?

Bowlder

It's just part of the template, not a Microsoft conspiracy to own your software. – Hollar

Yes, but it's new since VS 2005, so it's downright a little stupid. – Bowlder

The alternative is defaulting to YourCompany, but then the programmer would look even sillier if s/he forgot to change it. – Hollar

The license that you clicked through when you installed VS requires you to claim copyright on your software. The name is just a place holder, making it obvious that a company name should be entered there. Nobody is likely to understand what "Contoso" means. – Castrato

Btw, I've seen several DLLs that had "Enter your company name here" in their copyright notice. Hehe. – Castrato

Answer 1

This is part of the default templates. You can add your own, or replace the defaults. For details, see Visual Studio Templates - in particular, Creating Project Templates.

Brutish

Thanks. Do you have any speculative comments as to why it's MS by default? :) – Bowlder

@Cecil: They made the templates that are there by default. ;) Personally, I think they should make the defaults "Unknown" or something, not Microsoft, but I think they wanted to include something so people would know to put that in place. – Brutish